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“You really need to develop a whole product solution—hardware, software, UI, interfaces, and process redesign—with a consideration for what problem you are really trying to solve.” —Aldo Zini
Getting large teams of robots to collaborate is the work of Dr Regis Vincent, who envisions applications that include mapping nuclear contamination.
What obstacles remain for robots to work alongside humans in industrial settings, and how far have we come in eliminating those challenges? Dr. Roland Menassa answers these and other questions in his presentation at the RoboBusiness summit November 2-3 in Boston.
John Reid, director of Product Technology and Innovation at Moline Technology Innovation Center, a part of John Deere’s Global Technology Innovation Network, discusses how his company’s technologies will help feed the world’s billions.
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More The experimental system utilizes two onboard, single scan-line LADAR devices to negotiate obstacles and hone in on warehouse pallets. (LADAR—Laser Detection and Ranging—is an optical technology which measures properties of scattered laser light to find range and other information about a distant target.) One LADAR device, located at the base of the AGV, is used as a safety sensor to detect obstacles such as humans in the forklift’s path. It also can be used to scan inside a truck’s cargo area to detect the presence of a pallet or define distances from the forklift to the truck’s inside walls.
The other sensor, called the Panner, is a panning laser ranger mounted on a rotating motor at the top front of the AGV. The Panner acquires many scan lines of range data that allows the scene in front of the device to be reconstructed in various visual formats such as a pseudo-colored coded image (where colors indicate relative proximity to an object) or a 3-dimensional data point “cloud.” A computer model is then derived from the data with the output sent immediately to the AGV’s control center. This allows the robot forklift to maneuver, load and unload pallets, verify the remaining space within the truck being loaded, and track the number of pallets still needing handling.
The research team recently presented the results of its visualization program at the SPIE Optics East 2006 Conference in Boston.* Transbotics is planning to implement the NIST pallet verification software on one of its AGVs in 2007 for use in real manufacturing situations.
* R. Bostleman, T. Hong and T. Chang. Visualization of Pallets. Presented at the SPIE Optics East 2006 Conference. October 2006 (published online Oct. 2, 2006).
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